When I Am Weak, Part 1

Meditations on unexpected reminders that I am dust

This turned into a 4-part miniseries: part 1, part 2, part 3, and a coda.

I’m interrupting my meditation project with a two-part personal reflection. This is partly because I feel like I have to write on this – I can’t not at the moment – and partly because these are also in a sense meditations on a piece of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians:

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
(2 Corinthians 12:8-9)

Last year I read a great piece of journalism (that sadly I can’t find) on “spoonies,” which has two meanings:

1) People who have disabilities or chronic illnesses, some with clear medical definitions like lupus or MS, and some with more dubious or self-diagnosed conditions. These conditions aren’t obviously visible, but they limit people’s energy or wellness in ways that make normal life harder – you’re living with “spoons” of energy instead of the normal “cups.”

2) “Social media communities” of people self-identifying with these conditions, that ostensibly exist for support or encouragement but practically seem to foster self-pity, envy, and (self-imposed?) decline instead of recovery.

The piece was fair-minded and healthily detached; I came away with a greater sense of pity and compassion for the real people in sense 1, and a firmer conviction that “social media communities” around problems like sense 2 are, depending on your worldview, the modern equivalent of opium dens or plagues from the pit of Hell. But I confess that I also came away with a mild scorn for what I saw as the shades of self-pity and self-indulgence of spoonies.

This year, I began becoming one.

When I Became Weak

It started in March with weird weakness and soreness, with some other symptoms that prompted me to seek medical attention. A few rounds of tests led to a provisional diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis, which is when the immune system attacks the liver. My doctors started me on a short-term treatment plan of steroids (which among other things produced the relatively pleasant side effect of mild insomnia, and consequently my most productive writing season since having kids).

Some of my symptoms resolved, but some didn’t. I lost the strength to do a single pushup, toss my kids into the air, then shoot a basketball. I had some difficulty swallowing, which I chalked up to steroid-induced acid reflux. But inflammatory diseases can take months to subside, so I trusted that things would get better.

Then came September.

We were still in Wilmington, but packing to move back home to Birmingham, Alabama. I started feeling worse again, but this time worse became worse. I couldn’t pick up moving boxes. My arms, hands, and then ankles started swelling like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. I lost the ability to lift my arms over my head and started having trouble with things like putting on socks and getting out of bed. When can I sit down? became a constant thought. It started taking an hour to eat.

One thing leads to another, and here we are in Birmingham, with a 95-percent certain diagnosis of a condition called dermatomyositis, which is where the immune system attacks muscle tissue (and sometimes skin tissue for kicks and giggles). It’s generally manageable with long-term immunosuppressants, which I’ve begun, but I’m still very much in the weak-and-slow stage of fighting the disease, and it’s not certain yet what’s going to bounce back, what we’re going to have to rehab back, and what may never recover.

I share this, not because I want pity, but because this period of weakness has forced me to think about some things I’ve never had to think about before. Like Dennis in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

But I’ve been forced to learn some lessons around humility that I wanted to share in no particular order. I’ll put one in today’s piece and the rest in the next.

Humility is living in the tensions between acceptance and resistance, lament and gratitude.

I don’t fully agree with Aristotle’s approach of defining every virtue as the healthy mean between two bad extremes, but there’s some wisdom in it. That spoonie piece highlighted people whose “online support” led them into extremes of self-pity, self-indulgence, and willful giving up in the face of their conditions that horrified me. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s easy to imagine people reacting to these conditions with prideful denial, bitterness, or other forms of Dylan Thomas’ “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

In my brief stint with this, I’ve already been tempted to both extremes, sometimes in the same day. I am not speaking from pride, but from learning new dimensions of humility.

I think I’m finding humility as living in at least two tensions: acceptance and resistance, and lament and gratitude.

Acceptance and Resistance

On the one hand, humility involves accepting some realities that I would rather not. I had to wake my wife up so she could help lift me out of bed, so I could get up obscenely early and start writing this (thank you, honey, if you remember!). It’s a coin toss each morning whether I can get myself dressed without help. And so on. I could be pissed about these things – and sometimes I am – and hopefully some or most of these will change as my medicines kick in, but some of the brute facts of my life are simply different from this time last year. “Dust (in Latin humus) you are, and to dust you are returning” is a tough pill to swallow, but part of humility is choking it down.

And yet.

I think humility is incomplete without a healthy dash of resistance as well. Adam (Hebrew for “dust!” wasn’t just made from dust, but Godsbreath too – the Spirit that formed and filled the world. We’re made to resist decay and chaos, and proper humility includes wondering, “but what can I do?” Realizing I can’t put my contacts in as normal is humbling; but so, somehow, is the joy of figuring out I can do it with one hand. Accepting that I can’t always put on my belt is humbling; but so, somehow, is making it work and getting the thing on. Resisting my natural entropy runs me against my limits, which are tighter than they used to be; but there’s something in that tension that feels more human than acceptance alone.

Lament and gratitude

Similarly, humility involves lament, which one pastor describes as “a prayer in pain that leads to trust.” Lament is facing the brokenness of the world – in this case, the weakness of my body – with sorrow and even anger, before the face of God. I’m not naturally good at this: I’m more of a Stoic by temperament, and probably shade toward denial. But I’m finding that sometimes my wife needs me to grieve with her, and sometimes I need to grieve toward God. Sometimes this weakness sucks, and pretending it doesn’t doesn’t do me or her any good. We’ve found some beautiful moments not just praying for healing, but merely praying our sadness or fear together.

And yet.

The very problems that make me lament also make small moments of victory or grace stand out all the more. Allison’s myriad kindnesses to me. My four-year-old, who has made it her job to help me get my socks on. The moments when I can roll myself out of bed or get my own durn self dressed without help. I find myself noticing things I was taking for granted a year ago; and in better moments, I can receive those as the undeserved gifts they are.

Allison is reading The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, which is all about reflecting on God’s providence, grace, and hope to find humble contentment in God, whatever our circumstances. (And it’s from the 1600s, which were vastly tougher circumstances than ours) It’s filled with treasures like this:

“[E]very comfort that the saints have in this world is an earnest penny to them of those eternal mercies that the Lord has provided for them.”

And:

“Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, freely submitting to, and taking delight in God’s wise, and fatherly disposal in every condition.”

These small moments of gratitude are humbling, but humbling in a way that reminds me who I am and who God is.

Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash